…to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a talent.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

…hear the language, this English, double-jointed as Bedivere’s limbs. It only sounds awkward. In its ability to join one concept to another as with pegs, its dependent clauses, figures of speech and cadenced alliteration, a...

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the...

I think we can all agree that the official language of the United States should be Latin.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

The budget overrides the law. We have to target the budget and have language in [it] that prohibits that expenditure.

Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn’t it like taking a bite of something lovely? If...

There is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that...

Being able to speak the language of Silicon Valley to venture capitalists is very important.

The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and...

The play is more about their struggle, their battle, … It’s also playing with what language is and what language isn’t. Is language what makes us human?

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our...

object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on...

Some things should never be said. Not out loud in clear, simple words. You talk around them. You leave gaps and blanks. You use other words and talk in curves and arcs for the worst...

Anguish is the universal language

Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.

The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I’m completely in awe...

Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho somen gelen Emÿna daÿda”[modern: Minä tahdon kernaasti puhua suomen kieltä, [mutta] en minä taida](“I willingly want to speak Finnish, [but] I am not able”)(found in a German travel journal c.1450)

Chromosomes. Sex. Grasshoppers. “Pick me up, Mommy.”This is an odd list, except in the eye of evolution. For in the major developments in the history of life, the ability to say, “Pick me up, Mommy”...

The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the...

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can’t describe how bad you feel,...

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire...

A conglomerate of complicated words, they confuse, condemn and cajole, created, he is sure, for the sole purpose of fuddling the listener, which in this case is regrettably him.

Don’t live by your thoughts only; live by your words also. Whatever plans you think about, affirm it in your mouth first, declare it and you will succeed in working it out! Words can be...

When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal – my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.

… since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.

There’s a specificity of language that’s required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with – a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.

I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. I opened my head, at the place provided, and proceeded to pronounce the true...

Toxemia. A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently.

I’m learning sign language to be a better communicator and masturbator.

What does it matter if you can speak two or more languages if you have nothing original to say in any language?

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text,...

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of ‘Mary Jane’ for reasons that everybody is much...

If a person plays dissonance long enough, it will sound like consonance. It’s a language that was alien and then it’s less and less alien as it continues to live.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky...

Thirst is a language even the grass understands.

Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She’s said a tearful good-bye to okay some...

In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have—the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.

The ‘Dance of Love’ is much more of a dialogue, one takes the lead and the other follows. One dictates a step and the other carries it out. One determines the direction, the other determines...

I don’t understand why people never say what they mean. It’s like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn’t...

Time. The most powerful word in the language. In any language.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of...

American schools in Guam, both before 1941 and after 1945, were established to eradicate the Chamoru, tongue and person. To educate the old Chamoru out of the new American. The native out of the patriot…But...

For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to...